Ice Fishing Report 4-4

[raywriter]

Two of us went out between Gladstone and Kipling today, in a perch search, but were limited in mobility because we had open water visible close to places we had to walk past. I mean water near shore and out on the weed flats as well. We found good ice and punched quite a few holes, but the end is very near.

Anyway, we purposely went without minnows because we did not want walleyes hitting our baits if possible. You know the rest of the story. We saw walleyes everywhere we drilled holes, while using the camera. One particularly nice 27" - 28" fish just had to grab a waxworm and my friend landed it with a quick release. We could not find any perch. We also saw some big suckers. We sure thought at least a few big perch would hang with the walleyes, but no such luck.

[The Bait Shop Guy]

I headed up to Kipling after work on Saturday. No problem getting on the ice there. Shoreline everywhere else was in pretty bad shape, though. Once you get offshore the top few inches is honeycombed, but there's still at least 18 inches of good ice under that. Ice was pretty bad all around Butler's Island, so I didn't even try to cross it to get to where I'd been fishing at. I just stayed in the channel and fished North East of the access. Caught perch in every hole I fished. Ended up landing 40 of them - but not a keeper in the bunch! I lost several that felt like bigger fish, though. Everything on a gold Hali jig tipped with spikes.